1. rogue nuclear attack from 000 to ir presents failsafe dilemma
2. perennial wish of mic to liquidate inventory for profit
3. drive of centcom for precedence lost/in jeopardy during Ukraine conflict
4. mic constituency behind 000
5. domestic politics, 000 reps and neocons
6. blackmail of principals
7. justification for domestic repression
8. elimination of checks and balances, federalism, coequal branches
9. Machinder's soft underbelly of Russia, the old UK strategy, Comer's colonialism, use of the diaspora.
10. "Strangle China" the ultimate objective/cut off oil/raise oil prices
11. Imposition of AI/TIA feudal AI oligolopies/legitimize digital fascist infrastructure
12. Assumption of wartime "emergency economic powers" in order to implement socioeconomic liquidation of "debt crisis."
(I credit my initial but limited exposure a long time ago to Chu Hyun-mi, the trot diva from South Korea, who sang Teresa Teng's classic The Moon Represents My Heart (月亮代表我的心) which became popular in South Korea. Chu's voice has some of the same qualities as that of Lily Li in the last recording below 愛江山更愛美人(The Bold And The Beautiful).
I saw this video above which referred to a young woman raised in the US of mixed US-Chinese descent who typified a trend on tiktok she called becoming Chinese. Such posts are sometimes associated with a recording or lyric from A Spray of Plum Blossoms. "Being a cultural intermediary" increasing US-Chinese contact on social media was the theme. The song dates from 1984. Much later, just about the time the song was about to become a trend on social media, the composer Peter Chen passed away. I saw one commentary say he was considered the father of Mandarin pop music in Taiwan. Chen appears to have had a great role in the develop of modern influence in Chinese songs. He's said to have influenced Teresa Teng and many other Chinese singers in the modern era. Chen was born in Chengdu but moved with family to Taiwan at age 3 in 1947.
This is a version of the song performed by the original composer. Chen who was raised and came of age in Taiwan and returned to the mainland in 1988. He became interested in song writing and music at a very young age, although his family wanted him to be an engineer. I like Chen's rendition of a Spray of Plum Blossoms, and it had a fairly good English translation in video subtitles. One or more of Chen's songs were subject to censorship in Taiwan because they alluded to his love of his homeland. When he obtained the opportunity in 1988 to return to his hometown on the mainland he did so.
I'll note here that the Baidu write up on the song doesn't appear to credit Peter Chen for the composition. Several people with the family name Chen appear to have been involved in the song's production but not Peter Chen born as Chen Hsiao-yin (陳曉因). Peter's acquired name appears to be phoneticized Chinese 陳彼得. Fei Yu-ching was the original singer, and I've seen an old photo of the two of them collaborating in their younger days, but couldn't read the blurred caption. Obituaries commemorating Chen's death in June 2025, credit him for composing the now world famous song. The video here credits him as composer and singer.
This is the computer translation of the write up on the song from Baidu:
"A Spray of Plum Blossoms" was written by Chen Yu-zhen (Wawa), composed by Chen Hsin-yi (?), and arranged by Chen Chih-yuan. [4]The popular song sung by Fei Yu-ching is included in Fei Yu-ching's album "Yangtze River Water - This Love Will Never Stay" released on April 21, 1983. [ 1]The song was the theme song for the 1984 Taiwanese CTV TV series of the same name, " Yi Jian Mei ". It was later used as the theme song for the 2009 TV series " New Yi Jian Mei " and the promotional song for the 2015 movie " Goodbye Mr. Loser ". [43].
The song title “Yi Jian Mei ” is taken from the ancient ci poem title of the same name , which highlights the theme of this work about eternal true feelings. [19]The lyrics created by Wawa transfer the spirit and character of perseverance to the realm of male-female relationships. As a love song, the snow in "A Spray of Plum Blossoms" is the background, and the plum blossom is the protagonist. [20].
In June 2020, "Yi Jian Mei" suddenly topped the Spotify music charts in many countries and won several championships (No. 1 in Norway, No. 1 in New Zealand, No. 2 in Sweden, No. 2 in Finland), and the related topics also had more than one million views. A "XUE HUA PIAO PIAO" (from the line beginning "Snow flakes are falling..)* challenge even swept the Internet, with many young men and women overseas singing the lyrics together. Its pinyin spelling also became popular online and even became a meme among young people in Europe and America.
https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E4%B8%80%E5%89%AA%E6%A2%85/2983558
* 雪花飘飘 XUE HUA PIAO PIAO
This is a wuxia (martial arts) piece below. I get the impression that whoever put together the video may have borrowed scenes unrelated to the Heaven Sword and Dragon Sabre tv series. It looks like the Jet Li clips with his romantic counterpart were taken from Soldier II. "The Bold and the Beautiful" is just another interpretation of the title.
愛江山更愛美人(The Bold And The Beautiful)|李麗芬，金庸武俠金曲， 高清(HD)，中英文字幕, English Lyrics，2020
"I love the country more than the beauty" is a song sung by Li Lifen , with lyrics and music by Xiao Chong , and arrangement by Liang Bojun and Xiao Chong. It was included in the album " Let's Make a Promise " released on January 22, 1994. [1][10]The song was selected as the ending theme for the 1994 TV series "The Heaven Sword and Dragon Saber" starring Ma Jingtao , Cecilia Yip , and Kathy Chow .
I love the country more than the beauty
https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E6%84%9B%E6%B1%9F%E5%B1%B1%E6%9B%B4%E6%84%9B%E7%BE%8E%E4%BA%BA/4155920
Believe it or not, I chose this song for the powerful impression it makes during troubled times. I chose this version for the English subtitles.
The "little Chinese woman" as I have nicknamed her, is an intrepid traveler throughout the Asian mainland. I found this recent episode (part 2) of her recent trip through Iran interesting:
I think the video is from January. If I remember correctly, she did go to Tehran but was advised by her friend there not to linger because of social unrest. What interested me were the economic conditions.
Important reminder from Sun Tzu on planning to go to war:
https://eastasiastudent.net/china/classical/sunzi-bingfa-shiji/
孫子 兵法 始計 translation: Laying Plans, The Art of War, by Sun Zi
Gen Brunson USFK
"If U.S. bases on Korean soil are used for operations directed at China, South Korea would not remain a peripheral observer...Retaliation would not fall on distant decision-makers, but on Korean cities, infrastructure and citizens."https://t.co/kQVPlSNbJI
South Korea’s Ministry of National Defense lodged a complaint with U.S. Forces Korea over a brief standoff between American and Chinese fighter jets, according to local media.
Excellent MBCNews report on US-Chinese air confrontation over West Sea. US fighter aircraft launched from Osan AFB, South Korea.
Biden and Blinken's dream of a seamless trilateral military alliance with South Korea and Japan has turned to dust. Takaichi is just too right-wing and deeply pines for the bad old days of Japanese colonialism. https://t.co/sxrhBSHTHo
FinCEN regulation (31 CFR Part 1031.320)
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The Chinese cultural sphere graphically- I obtained the graphic below and description from a Quora post by Jamin addressing the question whether a Chinese person could read or understand Korean written in hanja/hanzi. I was unable to directly elicit and post the link to this interesting write up by Jamin. The exact topic of his post is
Can a Chinese person understand Korean that is translated exactly word by word into Chinese?
This is a link I found indirectly on google-
https://learninglanguages.quora.com/https-www-quora-com-Can-a-Chinese-person-understand-Korean-that-is-translated-exactly-word-by-word-into-Chinese-answer#:~:text=Can%20a%20Chinese%20person%20understand,in%20Chinese%3F%20The%20characters%2C%20%E2%80%9C%E6%B1%89%E5%AD%97%E6%96%87%E5%8C%96%E5%9C%88
I used to marvel at a few old South Korean newspaper front pages I had saved just before we returned to the US in 1990. Those newspapers were printed with the mixed hanja/hangeul script still in use in some South Korean newsprint. This chart below from Jamin's quora post shows the mandarin script iterations in the different East Asian countries in the Chinese "cultural sphere" historically. Not sure what the first script is. Think it might be Hokkien or Hakka, don't recognize it.
The characters, “汉字文化圈” (East Asian cultural sphere), as they appear in Traditional and Simplified Chinese, Cantonese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese — languages that could be written, either fully or partially, using Chinese characters or a variant thereof (looking at Vietnamese over there)
This might blow your mind, but it is possible to write at least part of Korean in Chinese characters.
Called Hanzi in Chinese and Hanja in Korean, these characters can be used in Korean since it has historically borrowed a lot of Chinese vocabulary, so even if Korean is its own language family and the grammar and sentence structure may not resemble those that you find in Chinese languages (which is why Korean has its own alphabet, hangul), you can still use Chinese characters that represent Chinese vocabulary to get your point across in Korean — and a Chinese speaker may understand the gist of it, without knowing any Korean.
Something similar can be done with Japanese, but more people are aware of the use of Chinese characters in Japanese than they are of the use of Chinese characters in Korean, because the latter isn’t all that common anymore.
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